


swelter swelter; an ode to first love

by allrisenim



Category: Super Junior
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Romance, Summer, and its bittersweet, country bumpkin! yehyuk, countryside, just in case you know, kid! yehyuk, listen boy...... my first love story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-08-29 07:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16739716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allrisenim/pseuds/allrisenim
Summary: Yesung recalls the last summer of their lives.





	swelter swelter; an ode to first love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [THE YEHYUK GC](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=THE+YEHYUK+GC).



> OR, in which yesung teaches hyukjae a thing or two about love and realises he has a lot more to learn himself
> 
> AKA, rubbish excuse for me to wax lyrical about summers ive never lived through and throw yehyuk into the equation because i cant. suffer . myself. 
> 
> some of this is incoherent, and became oddly personal at times. would love to hear your interpretations cos even i.... idk. like comment subscrube! i mean leave kudos and comments or whatever goes on here

In July I watched you, clasped in a summer’s heat, swimming in the fractures of a splintering sun. You had half a palm in my hair once; when you were sat shotgun in your father’s truck, clad in your father’s shorts. The ice pack you fetched me meant solidarity, but raising it to my bleeding nose was affection. My hands were scarlet in yours. 

 

Summer wouldn’t be over until you’d divorced yourself from my backyard tree. Under which we were but rubescent, heat-blistered younguns, giddy with love, or some counterfeit derivative. The ugly side of your face staged the waltz of a hundred floretting shadows, as with each indolent sway of a crown caught in wind. Or rather, it was the side of your face you found ugly, though I had never been able to say the same. A scar is a lightning bolt, and its sky a persimmon branch, the ones your sticky hands had developed a partial affinity for until you lost your balance one Tuesday afternoon. You told me it was a mistake. I called you lovely. 

 

As a matter of fact I always did. I said “Lee Hyukjae has a ring to it”, and now I’ll remember you when I see a falling fruit, a ruddy cheek, bare feet on a shovelled bed of grass. It's in the same way the smell of citrus brings back spells of anamnesis; to when we sat, abreast to a bruising sky, our nailbeds saturated with pulp, our fingers smarting with acid. I was never the type to run, you see; my mother oft introduced me to others as placid, and temperamental. I enjoyed writing, and the distal hum of a tractor engine; a sun towed towards the horizon, as would tired bulbuls to their nests. So picture my perturbation the first time I met you! Myself, in slacks, looking up from my diary; and you, a shirtless, half-violent blur, your knees littered with poppy flowers and small cuts. I stood just a little taller, my lips over the soft curl of your nose.

  
  


Curiosity hunted me for the days that followed until I found you, nakedly, by the river. “Aesongie  _ hyung _ ,” you declared, proud under the ebbing sunshine, “Today we are on the cusp of greatness!” 

 

I was never the type to run, but I followed you anyway, tripping over my feet, freshwater lapping at my shoes and socks til I was sodden with feeling. Eden splits from where you had remembered to catch your breath; we’re tipping over the rocks, I’m riding off your high. And then at some point I had begun to discard, my clothes and my chariness for your favour; and suddenly I too was sprinting into a perennial green. The sun didn’t set for days because time bends for you; by Wednesday we had sailed down to where the river unfurled into inlets, electric. We waited, propped on our elbows, for a brassy dawn; then I called you my brother, so we swallowed the sun between our teeth like a large grapefruit until we were both smatterings of heat and skin, chiasmatic on the river bank. Only hours later did our parents arrive to find their sleepy, mud-flecked children curled by the waters and you giggled, readied for the beatings you would soon after receive.

 

Plainly speaking I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon, but that evening when the sky was a godly skirt of red all around, you lifted your eyes into its ruffles and parted the marshes for the foot of my door. You had come, frothing with tears, and so my mother gathered you in her arms as if you were her own. By all means you were a ‘trouble child’, but when you flinched under my mother’s mercy I felt an ache of my own; you were sanguine from the carnage so we dressed your wounds, winnowed trauma from the ribbons on the back of your thighs. I wanted to tell you: here, with me, is where light sinks eternally, is a place of sweetened milk and healing—is your chapel, where we learn to worship the feeling that eddies between. 

  
  


You have six moles on your back. I counted them with glee the morning you had discovered my mother’s flowers; then unseamed them for the studs of nectar that glistened under their anthers. Initially of course I had cursed you: LEE HYUKJAE YOU ARE A RIOT, I shouted, and you gleamed in the spoilage, raising your blemished lungs to a universe that breathed back. But my mother is patient—“little fire”, she called out, for the sprawling brute amongst her petunias, his molars sopped in honey.  _ To take without giving is to destroy, _ she continued, rolling her hands in yours til they were sprouting with seeds,  _ Love is about leaving space to grow. _

  
  


And there we were, collapsed on our sides, shedding our old skins. Growth is an effulgent gold, a fidgeting pulse against this weathered slate of grass, is you sowing flowers in soil and leaving the nectar in. Under my backyard oak, we sang, swelter swelter, this is the space where love flourishes. I pressed myself to forget the difficult questions, moulted them like scar tissue; how could I ask, with grace,  _ where did it hurt most,  _ or  _ why does every trip back to your farmhouse return you purple.  _ So I didn’t. Kept our tongues buffering for half-truths: The sky is cyan. Some ghosts are good.

  
  


On a rainy night you ran south for my door again, said your father had ruined you, said the marshes brimmed so full you nearly drowned. This time I had been the one to gather you in my arms, swath your shivering body in my old sweaters. Soon after we were sat on the veranda, spectators to the world around, my thumb pressed against your blue lip in wonder. The questions came once more, in coagulations, clotting in the front of my mouth but I clenched my teeth and swallowed. Instead I taught you to rhyme. 

 

_ Splash. Dash. Mash _

_ Shutter. Flutter. Butter _

_ Yellow. Mellow. Shallow _

_ Shallow doesn’t rhyme! _

_ Yes it does _

_ Does not _ —

 

Laughter cracked from your splitting lips as would an orange cleaved under a chopping knife—and other things I hadn’t had the words to describe back then. All I knew was that we were both happy; two liminal, boyish beings clawing at the stars and picturing what it was like to be celestial. I brought you my mother’s freshly-plucked pears and between us we gobbled them down like hooligans, then disposed of their acrid cores in the crevices of my floorboard. Maybe somewhere, brittle under a clap of thunder, I had confessed,  _ I think I love you, like in the way Mama says it to Papa when she turns off her bed lamp at night.  _ You babbled about the constellations and I thought about the six moles on your back; bolt of lightning and I recalled the scar on your face. 

  
  
  


The fifth week of summer was a slow death. We bit into our apples and jumped at the sight of worms; travelled for hours to see the crop circles, skimmed the edge of August for a heaven that had abandoned us. The air was ripe with decay, like many things that don't go together: fire and ice. My lips on yours. A pliant mouth to my inordinate hunger. You gave me an inch and I pleaded a mile; chased you down that belt of asphalt that ended in two supine bodies on the couch in your garden shed, and I wondered why I had bothered to count the things that were made to be infinite.

 

_ That’s okay _

_ We’re okay _

 

Except our new skins hurt. Except I looked at you one day and was filled with both love and awfulness. You were elysian but light kept falling the wrong way.

 

So I prayed for sunshine, and you played god; guided us back to the river bank and perched yourself on one of those rocks. I was knee-deep in water, and you, drowsy in my guilt, one foot rested on my chest and you asked me to come closer. 

 

 _But it feels wrong, suddenly._ _All these feelings…_

_ So you don’t like me? _

_ NO, no, I still do _

  
  


I wanted to add, how villainous isn’t quite always an assembly of black birds, or old wheels hitting the tar—it’s loving you and looking down at soiled hands. 

  
  
  


 

In the seventh week, disease swept through the fields. Your father handed you a shovel so you could too be a “real man”, and I wondered if “real man” was the reason your mother oft nursed a bottle and hoped to disappear; was the reason you began to fear the hand that draws blood.

 

Because it was “real man” that had caught up to us finally, uprooted us from the garden shed where we stood, polluted with feeling, under a buffered purl of sunshine. Here I peeled you open, my muddy hands speckled with pulp, though you cradled them all the same. Here I said sorry to you, and  _ maybe it would be best for us to forget. So put down the knife; the chapel is burning. _

 

Expiration sounds a lot like a felled tree, light flayed from its source, two callous hands stirring for carmine. Here they tore you away; something destructive, like the cytokinetic pull of land from the tide, like in the way I found you shovelling through my mother’s petunias. The flesh under your belly button began to rot, like the time we dug our fingers into fruit and found worms. I fastened the belt over my shorts, or your shorts, or your father’s shorts, as they had been once. I laid myself down for the tears that would not come. I smiled thinking of yours, and sang  _ swelter, swelter, _ here lies the last summer of our lives.

 

 

 


End file.
